In Fibre Channel systems, one or more hosts connect to one or more I/O (input/output) devices via a Fibre Channel fabric. The one or more I/O devices perform I/O services for the one or more hosts. The one or more I/O devices may comprise storage devices. The one or more I/O devices may include I/O controllers conforming to the Fibre Channel/SCSI (small computer system interface) Protocol (FCP) or Fibre Channel Single-Byte Command Code Sets-3 (FC-SB-3 or FICON) standards. The one or more I/O devices may include an I/O physical adapter for communicating with the one or more hosts via the Fibre Channel fabric. A unique N_Port ID (identifier) is obtained for the I/O physical adapter. Then, the I/O physical adapter may be utilized to send one or more Fibre Channel frames utilizing the unique N_Port ID.
The one or more I/O devices may each require the ability to appear as separate independent I/O devices. Typically, to provide this functionality, each of the one or more I/O devices includes multiple I/O physical adapters. A unique N_Port ID may be obtained for each of the multiple I/O physical adapters. Then, each of the multiple I/O physical adapters may be utilized to send one or more Fibre Channel frames utilizing their respective unique N_Port ID. The multiple I/O physical adapters may provide each of the one or more I/O devices additional bandwidth into the fabric.